Humorous and Practical Ways to Exit Vim

Hardcore Exit Vim

The simplest way is to find the Vim process and kill it:

:!ps axuw | grep vim | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill -9

(Obviously the usual :q would be preferred.)

Without using ps , you can also exit Vim with:

:!kill -9 $(find /proc -name status | while read file; do echo "$file: "; cat $file | grep vim; done | grep -B1 vim | grep -v Name | while read line; do sed 's/^\/proc\///g' | sed 's/\/.*//g'; done | xargs kill -9)

Luke also proposes a method that avoids ps by using status files:

:!find /proc -name status | while read file; do echo "$file: "; cat $file | grep vim; done | grep -B1 vim | grep -v Name | while read line; do sed 's/^\/proc\///g' | sed 's/\/.*//g'; done | xargs kill -9

A shorter variant is:

:!grep -P "PPid:\t(\d+)" /proc/$$/status | cut -f2 | xargs kill -9

For Python users there is a “Python way”:

:py3 import os,signal;from subprocess import check_output;os.kill(int(check_output(["pidof","vim"]).decode('utf-8')),signal.SIGTERM)

Luke also lists an extremely terse (and joking) method:

:!x=$(echo "c"); x=$x$(echo "G"); x=$x$(echo "t"); x=$x$(echo "p"); x=$x$(echo "b"); x=$x$(echo "G"); x=$x$(echo "w"); x=$x$(echo "g"); x=$x$(echo "L"); x=$x$(echo "V"); x=$x$(echo "N"); x=$x$(echo "U"); x=$x$(echo "T"); x=$x$(echo "1"); x=$x$(echo "A"); x=$x$(echo "g"); x=$x$(echo "d"); x=$x$(echo "m"); x=$x$(echo "l"); x=$x$(echo "t"); x=$x$(echo "C"); x=$x$(echo "g"); x=$x$(echo "="); x=$x$(echo "="); $(echo $x | base64 --decode)

Dimensionality‑Reduction Attack on Vim

If Vim runs inside a Docker container, you can stop the container to kill Vim:

docker run --rm -it --name my-vim -v `pwd`:/root thinkca/vim

Then stop it:

docker stop my-vim

At the system level you can set a timeout so Vim exits after 10 minutes:

$ timeout 600 vim

Or create an alias:

$ alias vim='timeout 600 vim'

Violent and Zen Methods

The most violent way is to pull the power plug; the most Zen way is to simply walk away.

A combined “violent‑Zen” one‑liner (not recommended to run on your own machine):

!bash -c “💣(){ 💣|💣& };💣”

Workplace Advice

For newcomers or interns, ask a senior engineer for help.

Product managers can follow a three‑step process: raise a request, set highest priority, and assign randomly to team members.

Vim: From Onboarding to Abandonment

The article concludes that the best solution is to avoid Vim altogether, as modern graphical editors like VS Code or Sublime provide a gentler learning curve.

Links to the original GitHub project and Hacker News discussion are provided for further reading.